ART: Brecht Vandenbroucke Paints Insanity, Death, and Disney

Brecht Vandenbroucke is a 24 year old artist living in Belgium. His paintings are crazy. They are hysterical, disturbing, and exciting. They incite a sense of ruckus indifference; a devil-may-care kind of childish giddiness.

Some pieces are stamped with text (“We must kill all the babies. They will grow up to be young and successful and they will steal our jobs” or “I have some very powerful virtual friends”). These sentences alone are amusing, like punch lines, but when paired with the images upon which they lie, Vandenbroucke’s work is complex; simultaneously light and dense, funny and darkly cynical. In other pieces, Vandenbroucke composes his elements like characters on stage- the Monopoly guy, a punk, some business men, and the Belgian flag, all in swift procession toward a lower left hand corner of the canvas where the road has ended and we see blocks of gold beneath the asphalt.
Individually, Vandenbroucke’s pieces read as satirical statements on our contemporary culture. When regarding his body of work at large, you kind of just want to be his friend. The humor present in every piece, the sarcasm, and cutting cultural criteque, give you confidence that Vandenbroucke is a pretty cool dude to hang out with.
He was recently added to the team over at NoBrow publications. Keep an eye out for him.